Jo had been their true north, their center. Without her, a chapter in his life was ending and the realization left him more than a little bereft.
He rose suddenly as that restlessness sharpened, intensified. He couldn’t just sit here. He didn’t really feel like spending the night on the hard ground, but at least he could take one of the horses out for a hard moonlit ride to work off some of this energy.
The thought inevitably touched off memories of the other ride he had taken into the mountains just days ago—and of the woman he had been doing his best not to think about for the past few days.
Tess had packed up all the medical equipment in Jo’s room and had left the ranch the night Jo died. He had seen her briefly at the funeral, a slim, lovely presence in a bright yellow dress amid all the traditionally dark mourning clothes. Jo would have approved, he remembered thinking. She would have wanted bright colors and light and sunshine at her funeral. He only wished he’d been the one to think of it and had put on a vibrant tie instead of the muted, conservative one he had worn with his suit.
To his regret, Tess had slipped away from the service before he had a chance to talk to her. Now he found himself remembering again those stunning few moments they had shared upstairs in his office bedroom, when she had simply held him, offering whatever solace he could draw from her calm embrace.
He missed her.
Quinn let out a breath. Several times over the past days, as he dealt with details, he had found himself wanting to turn to her for her unique perspective on something, for some of her no-nonsense advice, or just to see her smile at some absurdity.
Ridiculous. How had she become so important to him in just a matter of days? It was only the stress of the circumstances, he assured himself.
But right now as he stood in the Winder Ranch kitchen with this emptiness yawning inside him, he had a desperate ache to see her again.
She would know just the right thing to say to ease his spirit. Somehow he knew it.
If he just showed up on her doorstep for no reason, she would probably think he was an idiot. He couldn’t say he only wanted her to hold him again, to ease the restlessness of his spirit.
His gaze fell on a hook by the door and fate smiled on him when he recognized her jacket hanging next to his own denim ranch coat. He had noticed it the day before and remembered her wearing it a few nights when she had come to the ranch, before she moved into the spare room, but he had forgotten about it until just this moment.
If he gave it a moment’s thought, he knew he would talk himself out of seeing her while his heart was still raw and aching.
So he decided not to think about it.
He shrugged into his own jacket, then grabbed hers off the hook by the door and headed into the night.
* * *
The nature of hospice work meant she had to face death on a fairly consistent basis but it never grew any easier—and some losses hit much harder than others.
Tess had learned early, though, that it was best to throw herself into a project, preferably something physical and demanding, while the pain was still raw and fresh. When she could exhaust her body as much as her spirit, she had half a chance of sleeping at night without dreams, tangled-up nightmares of all those she had loved and lost.
The evening of Jo’s funeral, she stood on a stepladder in the room that once had been Scott’s, scraping layers of paint off the wide wooden molding that encircled the high ceiling of the room.
Stripping the trim in this room down and refinishing the natural wood had always been in her plans when she bought the house after Scott’s accident but she had never gotten around to it, too busy with his day-to-day care.
She supposed it was ironic that she was only getting around to doing the work she wanted on the room now that the house was for sale. She ought to leave the redecorating for the new owners to apply their own tastes, but it seemed the perfect project to keep her mind and body occupied as best she could.
The muscles of her arms ached from reaching above her head but that didn’t stop her from scraping in rhythm to the loud honky-tonk music coming from her iPod dock in the corner of the empty room.
She was singing along about a two-timin’ man so loudly she nearly missed the low musical chime of her doorbell over the wails.
Though she wasn’t at all in the mood to talk to anyone, she used any excuse to drop her arms to give her aching muscles a rest.
She thought about ignoring the doorbell, certain it must be her mother dropping by to check on her. She knew Maura was concerned that Jo’s death would hit her hard and she wasn’t sure she was in the mood to deal with her maternal worry.
Her mother would have seen the lights and her car in the driveway and Tess knew she would just keep stubbornly ringing the bell until her daughter answered.
She sighed and stepped down from the ladder.
“Coming,” she called out. “Hang on.”
She took a second before she pulled open the door to tuck in a stray curl slipping from the folded bandanna that held her unruly hair away from her face while she worked.
“Sorry, I was up on the ladder and it took me a minute...”
Her voice trailed off and she stared in shock. That definitely wasn’t her mother standing on her small porch. Her heart picked up a beat.
“Quinn! Hello.”
“Hi. May I come in?” he prompted, when she continued to stare at him, baffled as to why he might be standing on her doorstep.
“Oh. Of course.”
She stepped back to allow him inside, fervently wishing she was wearing something a little more presentable than her scruffiest pair of jeans and the disreputable faded cropped T-shirt she used for gardening.
“Were you expecting someone else?”
“I thought you might be my mother. She still lives in town, though my father died a few years back. He had a heart attack on the golf course. Shocked us all. Friends have tried to talk my mother into moving somewhere warmer but she claims she likes it here. I think she’s really been sticking around to keep an eye on me. Maybe she’ll finally move south when I take off for Portland.”
She clamped her mouth shut when she realized she was babbling, something she rarely did. She also registered the rowdy music coming from down the hall.
“Sorry. Let me grab that music.”
She hurried back to the bedroom and turned off the iPod, then returned to her living room, where she saw him looking at the picture frames clustered across the top of her upright piano.
He looked gorgeous, she thought, in a Stetson and a denim jacket that made him look masculine and rough.
Her insides did a long, slow roll but she quickly pushed back her reaction, especially when she saw the slightly lost expression in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was stripping paint off the wall trim in my spare bedroom. I...needed the distraction. What can I do for you?”
He held out his arm, along with something folded and blue. “You left your coat at the ranch. I thought you might need it.”
She took it from him and didn’t miss the tiny flicker of static that jumped from his skin to hers. Something just as electric sparked in his eyes at the touch.
“You didn’t need to drive all the way into town to return it. I could have picked it up from Easton some other time.”
He shrugged. “I guess you’re not the only one who needed a distraction. Everybody else took off tonight in different directions and I just didn’t feel like hanging around the ranch by myself.”
He didn’t look at her when he spoke, but she recognized the edgy restlessness in his silver-blue eyes. She wanted to reach out to him, as she might have done with anyone else, but she didn’t trust herself around him and she didn’t know if he would welcome her touch. Though he had that day at the ranch, she remembered.
“How are you at scraping
paint?” she asked on impulse, then wanted to yank the words back when she realized the absurdity of putting him to work in her spare room just hours after his foster mother’s funeral.
He didn’t look upset by the question. “I’ve scraped the Winder Ranch barn and outbuildings in my day but never done room trim. Is this any different?”
“Harder,” she said frankly. “This house has been through ten owners in its seventy-five years of existence and I swear every single one of them except me has left three or four layers of paint. It’s sweaty, hard, frustrating work.”
“In that case, bring it on.”
She laughed and shook her head. “You don’t know what you’re getting into, but if you’re sure you’re willing to help, I would welcome the company.”
It wasn’t a lie, she thought as she led him back to the bedroom after he left his jacket and hat on the living-room couch. She had to admit she was grateful to have someone to talk to and for one last opportunity to see him again before he left Pine Gulch.
“You don’t really have to do this,” she said when they reached the room. “You’re welcome to stay, even if you don’t want to work.”
Odd how what she had always considered a good-size space seemed to shrink in an instant. She could smell him, sexy and masculine, and she wished again that she wasn’t dressed in work clothes.
“Where can I start?”
“I was up on the ladder working on the ceiling trim. If you would like to start around the windows, that would be great.”
“Deal.”
He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt that looked expensive and tailored—not that she knew much about men’s clothes—and grabbed a paint scraper. Without another word, he set immediately to work.
Tess watched him for a moment, then turned the music on again, switching to a little more mellow music.
For a long time, they worked without speaking. She didn’t find the silence awkward in the slightest, merely contemplative on both their parts.
Quinn seemed just as content not to make aimless conversation and though she was intensely aware of him on the other side of the room, she wasn’t sure he even remembered she was in the room until eight or nine songs into the playlist.
“My father killed my mother when I was thirteen years old.”
He said the abrupt words almost dispassionately but she heard the echo of a deep, vast pain in his voice.
She set down her scraper, her heart aching for him even as she held her breath that he felt he could share something so painful with her now, out of the blue like this.
“Oh, Quinn. I’m so sorry.”
He released a long, slow breath, like air escaping from a leaky valve, and she wondered how long he had kept the memories bottled deep inside him.
“It happened twenty years ago but every moment of that night is as clear in my mind as the ride we took to Windy Lake last week. Clearer, even.”
She climbed down the ladder. “You were there?”
He continued moving the scraper across the wood and tiny multicolored flakes of paint fluttered to the floor. “I was there. But I couldn’t stop it.”
She leaned against the wall beside him, hesitant to say the wrong word that might make him regret sharing this part of his past with her.
“What happened?” she murmured, sensing he needed to share it. Perhaps this was all part of his grieving process for Jo, the woman who had taken him in and helped him heal from his ugly, painful past.
“They were fighting, as usual. My parents’ marriage was...difficult. My father was an attorney who worked long hours. When he returned home, he always insisted on a three-course dinner on the table, no matter what hour of the day or night, and he wanted the house completely spotless.”
“That must have been hard for a young boy.”
“I guess I was lucky. He didn’t take his bad moods out on me. Only on her.”
She held her breath, waiting for the rest.
“Their fighting woke me up,” Quinn said after a moment, “and I heard my dad start to get a little rough. Also usual. I went down to stop it. That didn’t always work but sometimes a little diversion did the trick. Not this time.”
He scraped harder and she wanted to urge him to spare himself the anguish of retelling the story, but again, she had that odd sense that he needed to share this, for reasons she didn’t understand.
“My dad was in a rage, accusing her of sleeping with one of the other attorneys in his firm.”
“Was she?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. My father was a bastard but she seemed to delight in finding and hitting every one of his hot buttons. She laughed at him. I’ll never forget the sound of her laughing, with her face still bruised and red where he had slapped her. She said she was having a torrid affair with the other man, that he was much better in bed than my father.”
She drew in a sharp breath, hating the thought of a thirteen-year-old version of Quinn witnessing such ugliness between his parents.
“I don’t know,” he went on. “She might have been lying. Theirs was not a healthy relationship, in any sense of the word. He needed to be in control of everything and she needed to be constantly adored.”
She thought of Quinn being caught in the middle of it all and her chest ached for him and she had to curl her fingers into her palms to keep from reaching for him.
“My father said he wasn’t going to let her make a fool out of him any longer. He walked out of the room and I thought for sure he was going to pack a suitcase and leave. I was happy, you know. For those few moments, I was thinking how much better things would be without him. No more yelling, no more fights.”
“But he didn’t leave.”
He gave a rough laugh and set the scraper down and sat beside her on the floor, his back against the wall and their elbows touching. “He didn’t leave. He came out of the bedroom with the .38 he kept locked in a box by the side of his bed. He shot her three times. Twice in the heart and then once more in the head. And then he turned the gun on himself.”
“Oh, dear God.”
“I couldn’t stop it. For a long time, I kept asking myself if I could have done something. Said something. I just stood there.”
She couldn’t help herself, she covered his hand with hers. After a long moment, he turned his hand and twisted his fingers with hers, holding tight. They sat that way, shoulders brushing while the music on her playlist shifted to a slow, jazzy ballad.
She kept envisioning that rough-edged, angry boy he had been when he first came to Pine Gulch. He must have been consumed with pain and guilt over his parents’ murder-suicide. She could see it so clearly, just as she saw in grim detail her own awful behavior toward him, simply because he had refused to pay any attention to her.
“I am so, so sorry, Quinn,” she murmured, for everything he had survived and for her own part in making life harder for him here.
“The first year after was...hellish,” he said, his voice low. “That’s the only word that fits. I was thrown into the foster-care system and spent several months bouncing from placement to placement.”
“None of them stuck?”
“I wasn’t an easy kid to love,” he said. “You knew me when I first came to Pine Gulch. I was angry and hurting and hated the world. Jo and Guff saw past all that. They saw whatever tiny spark of good might still be buried deep inside me and didn’t stop until they helped me see it, too.”
“I’m so happy you found each other.”
“Same here.” He paused, looking a little baffled. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I didn’t come here to dump it all on you. The truth is, I don’t talk about it much. I don’t think I’ve ever shared it with anybody but Brant and Cisco and Easton.”
“It’s natural to think about the circumstances that brought you into Jo’s world. I imagine it’s all connec
ted for you.”
“I was on a path to nowhere when Jo finally found me up in Boise and petitioned for custody. I was only the kid of a cousin. I’d never even met her but she and Guff still took me on, with all that baggage. She was a hell of a woman.”
“I’m going to miss her dearly,” Tess said quietly. “But I keep trying to focus on how much better a person I am because I knew her.”
Their hands were still entwined between them and she could feel the heat of his skin and the hard strength of his fingers.
“I don’t know what to make of you,” he finally said.
She gave a small laugh. “Why’s that?”
“You baffle me. I don’t know which version of you is real.”
“All of it. I’m like every other woman. A mass of contradictions, most of which I don’t even understand myself. Sometimes I’m a saint, sometimes I’m a bitch. Sometimes I’m the life of the party, sometimes I just want everybody to leave me alone. But mostly, I’m just a woman.”
“That part I get.”
The low timbre of his voice and the sudden light in his eyes sent a shower of sparks arcing through her. She was suddenly intensely aware of him—the breadth of his shoulder nudging hers, the glitter of silvery-blue eyes watching her, the scent of him, of sage and bergamot and something else that was indefinable.
Her insides quivered and her pulse seemed to accelerate. “I don’t regret many things in my life,” she said, her voice breathy and low. “But I wish I could go back and change the way I treated you when we were younger. I hate that I gave you even a moment’s unhappiness when you had already been through so much with your parents.”
His shoulder shrugged beside her. “It was a long time ago, Tess. In the grand scheme of life, it didn’t really mean anything.”
“I was so awful to you.”
“I wasn’t exactly an easy person to like.”
“That wasn’t the problem. The opposite, actually. I...liked you too much,” she confessed. “I hated that you thought I was some silly, brainless cheerleader. I wanted desperately for you to notice me.”
His mouth quirked a little. “How could I help it?”
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